Planting SEEDs for success

A gunshot pierced the air. Launice was struck in the head, killed in a shootout between rival drug dealers. She was the fourth murder victim in the neighborhood that day. Over time, the abandoned school would be torched repeatedly and became a haven for drug addicts and the homeless.

Then one day in early 1999, Raj Vinnakota ’93 visited Weatherless’ charred remains and decided it was the place to build his dream: the nation’s first urban boarding school.

Almost a decade later, Vinnakota’s SEED Foundation, an organization he helped found in 1997 with the goal of establishing urban boarding schools all across the country, continues to prepare students from underserved communities for college.

Princeton beginnings

It all started late on a Saturday night in the basement of Tower Club. Back for their first reunion in spring 1994, Vinnakota and four friends sat in the dining room and talked about how they wanted to change the world.

“The conversation turned to urban education,” Vinnakota said in an interview at the Foundation’s office in Washington this summer. “One of my friends said, ‘Why aren’t there boarding schools for poor kids?’ ”

A rigorous academic curriculum, constant access to role models and a safe environment, the group reasoned, would probably work with poor kids just as well as with rich ones.

“That nut basically stayed in my head for the next two years,” Vinnakota explained.

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Vinnakota majored in molecular biology and received a certificate from the Wilson School, writing two senior theses along the way. Too burned out for medical school, the former Forbes RCA took a position with Mercer Management Consulting.

During his second and third years with the firm, Vinnakota kept thinking back to that conversation in Tower. Finally, he took a leave of absence, crisscrossing the country for two months to research his idea.

“I was able to amass a lot of information about boarding school financials and programs,” Vinnakota said. “I met a group of about 15 people through my travels, and they all said, ‘Keep me in the loop.’ ”

In February 1997, Vinnakota proposed that the group meet for a weekend retreat. On a Sunday afternoon, amid a sea of whiteboards, spreadsheets and timelines, Vinnakota found himself alone with a fellow management consultant, Eric Adler, whom he had met only once before.

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Adler told Vinnakota the project could be done, but that it would take two people working fulltime. “Are you in?” Adler asked.

“I wouldn’t have come this far if I didn’t want to do it,” Vinnakota responded.

The next day, they told their firms they’d be leaving to work fulltime on opening their school.

Starting in an attic

Starting the project in the nation’s capital was more than mere happenstance.

“Frankly, there was a bit of hubris,” said Vinnakota, a former University trustee who chairs Princeton’s Annual Giving Committee. “If we can pull it off [in D.C.], we can pull it off anywhere.”

It wasn’t easy.

“Nobody believed in us except for ourselves,” Vinnakota recalled. “We had to really scrap to even get space. And so we got the attic at the Capital Children’s Museum.”

While the attic classrooms and dormitory space in a nearby nunnery were sufficient for the short term, by its third year SEED needed a new home. During a meeting with then-Washington City Councilman Kevin Chavous, Vinnakota happened to mention the abandoned Weatherless site.

“And Kevin basically said, ‘Oh my god, I completely forgot about it. That’s a perfect site for you guys,’ ” Vinnakota said.

Forty-five blocks east of the U.S. Capitol and just over the Anacostia River, the 4.5-acre site is bordered by federal land and a recreation center. In February 2000, after 10 months of negotiations, SEED finally convinced the D.C. Public Schools system to lease it the land.

“Literally the day after we got that approved, we went in and tore the building down to its core substructure,” Vinnakota said.

Planted and growing

Now in its 11th year, the D.C. SEED School has 325 students in grades seven through 12, with equal numbers of boys and girls. Because of the school’s popularity, the rising seventh grade class is selected each year through a random lottery.

On average, students enter the school about two to three grade levels behind, Vinnakota said. Those who complete 12th grade matriculate at schools like Princeton, Georgetown, Penn and Brown.

As a public school, the SEED School is required to administer the same standardized tests as the rest of the city’s public schools. The cost per student is roughly $35,000, about three times the average in the D.C. system. The school makes up the difference through the additional funding it receives as a public boarding school as well as through private donations.

The student body is 98 percent African American and 2 percent Hispanic, with roughly 80 percent living below the poverty line. Eighty-seven percent come from single- or no-parent homes, and 93 percent would be the first in their family to go to college.

Students stay on campus Sunday evening through Friday afternoon and live in groups of 12 to 14 in houses, each named for a different college or university. Houses are staffed by a life-skills coordinator who is on campus from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. and by two residential advisers who sleep on campus. Cell phones are not allowed on campus, and uniforms are required during the school day. Students return home on the weekends because of the prohibitive costs of round-the-clock supervision.

Vinnakota outlined the success rate for a sample class of 100 students.

Homesickness, discipline issues and family relocation reduce the class to 90 after the first year. The school then asks about 30 students to spend an extra year in middle school, and 15 leave rather than being held back. Of the 75 who start high school, roughly 65 graduate, and of those, 63 go on to college. Forty are on track to graduate from college in six years.

Vinnakota said that while there is still work to be done, SEED students are beating Washington’s graduation rate of roughly 50 percent.

“If you look at the number of entering D.C. ninth graders who matriculate at college, that number is 15 percent. We’re getting 75 to 80 percent of our kids to college,” he said.

They are also outperforming minority and low-income students nationwide.

“If you look at the national average for graduation [from college] in six years, it’s 68 percent,” he said. “For African Americans, it’s 38 percent. For low-income kids, it’s 22 percent. So we’re blowing those numbers out of the water.”

SEED does, however, lose many students along the way.

“The big challenge for us, and the one we’re really spending our time on, is how do we not lose kids in middle school,” he said. “We need to do a better job of getting more of them to continue with us.”

A ‘leap of faith’

When he steps back and remembers SEED’s earliest days, Vinnakota can’t figure out how it happened.

“Think about the parents of that first class and the leap of faith that they made with a school that literally did not exist,” Vinnakota said. “This skinny Indian kid and this short Jewish guy were telling them that we were going to send their kids off to college in six years. Think about the craziness in that.”

But ever since the school opened, the community has benefited from its presence on C Street, he said.

“It’s been phenomenal,” he said of the impact. “We were talking about the fact our school was torched 25 times in the two years before we were there. We now have a neighborhood with many families that own their own homes and an institution that has helped to stabilize the community.”

The level of parental involvement is varied, Vinnakota said, adding that some do “drop off the face of the earth.”

“[But] we also have highly motivated parents who do a lot of things on their own,” he said. “We have to push a lot of parents to be involved, but all of them want better for their children, so that’s the nut we can use to motivate everyone.”

When Vinnakota and Adler were just getting SEED off the ground, they contacted former University trustee Bent Henry ’69 at the suggestion of Princeton’s Office of Government Affairs. Henry gave Vinnakota a list of 40 Princetonians to contact for support and told him to use Henry’s name. One of those Princetonians was Washington lawyer Marc Miller ’69, whom Vinnakota met in spring 1997.

Miller didn’t think much of SEED’s chances.

“I was quite certain that he was very naive and that what he was proposing to do was a very nice idea but obviously couldn’t get done,” Miller said. “My reaction was: nice kid. It’s not going to hurt me to give him a little money and a little time.”

But Miller was hooked. He has served on the Foundation’s board of directors since its inception. A charter member of the D.C. SEED School’s board of trustees, he left that board in June to become a trustee for the new SEED school in Maryland.

Elizabeth Frazier ’94, the Foundation’s director of board governance, said SEED has brought out characteristics of Princeton alumni often overshadowed by its visible cadre in the business world.

“People always talk about the Princeton network helping you career-wise, but you don’t really think about it helping with philanthropy and helping people in need,” Frazier said. “People invest in SEED because they feel it’s changing an area that needs to be changed.”

Frazier added that while there has not been an intentional effort to bring Princetonians aboard, they naturally flock to the institution.

“Princeton instills a drive. You’re attracted to people who work hard and do good work and [to] the idea of giving back,” she said. “That common education we all earned at Princeton, throughout the generations ... it all binds us together.”

Princetonians also lead both schools’ boards of trustees. Vasco Fernandes ’77, a former vice president at Mercer, serves as chair of the Washington D.C. SEED School’s board of trustees, and Jack Laporte ’67, a vice president at T. Rowe Price, leads the board of the new SEED School of Maryland.

Responding to criticism

As SEED continues to grow, critics question the school’s justification for spending $35,000 a year per student when the greater student population in both D.C. and Maryland makes do with far less.

“That is a legitimate concern,” Miller admitted, but he challenged critics to look at SEED’s success.

“Our kids are not getting pregnant,” he said. “Our kids are not getting involved with crime. Our kids are not getting involved with drugs. It’s not 100 percent, but it’s really close.”

The social cost of not taking action now is great, Miller said.

“My argument would not be that we should get less, it’s that everyone else should get a lot more,” he explained. “There’s not enough money in public education, and there’s certainly not enough money used wisely in public education. The people who are working very hard to try to do things in new and innovative ways shouldn’t be penalized.”

A SEED produced for Princeton

When SEED officials started searching for students to fill its first class back in the late-1990s, they caught the attention of Sophia Echavarria ’09.

Then a student at West Elementary in Northwest D.C., Echavarria and her 90 sixth-grade classmates shared just two teachers. She wanted something different, and after convincing her parents, she entered SEED’s first lottery and won a slot.

The early years were tough.

“We were in an attic,” said Echavarria, SEED’s first graduate to attend Princeton. “The meals were awful the first couple of years. The facilities were not great. We didn’t have a gym ... In the winter it was always cold, and in the summer it was always really hot.”

But it could have been worse.

“I could have been going to a violent school. I could have been going to a school where the staff didn’t care,” she said. “I think that’s a small price to pay considering all the other conditions that could have been part of my high school experience.”

Echavarria said that while the constant construction on the campus during her time at SEED was often a nuisance, she felt she was watching something special.

“It was really great every day to see another brick get laid or another piece of drywall go up and really see the school get built,” she said. “Imagine being here and seeing Nassau Hall or Stanhope Hall go up. It feels historic. It feels very personal.”

College was a central focus from the very beginning. “On day one it was: ‘You are going to college. You are going to get some type of education after high school. It’s going to happen,’ ” Echavarria said.

She said naming each house after a college got students interested in higher education.

“You heard the names of these colleges really early,” she said. “That would encourage students to get online and look them up. So you have 12- and 13-year-olds looking up colleges online. That’s awesome.”

In addition to having a college counselor, SEED students visit college campuses throughout their middle and high school years and take a class designed to help them apply to and succeed in college. After students graduate, SEED provides support through two full-time college liaisons on staff.

“They were always inundating us with this culture,” Echavarria said. “It made you understand that, especially as a young, African-American, urban kid, this is part of your birthright, too.”

Echavarria said she recognizes the gift that she was given through her time with SEED.

“What I’ve been given is so uncommon, so precious, that I just feel that I owe so much for the experiences I was given,” she said. “It’s really a part of my heart ... I’ve had so many great experiences with the school regardless of bad food or cramped spaces or moving around all the time. And at the end, I got to go to Princeton."

Planting more SEEDs

Eleven years after opening its first school in D.C., the SEED Foundation christened the new SEED School of Maryland last month on the 52-acre-site of the Southwestern High School in Baltimore.

Complete with an 800-seat auditorium, football field and indoor pool, the school started with its first sixth grade class this year and will eventually have 400 students. State law mandates that the school allow students from every county in the state to apply for the lottery.

Efforts are currently underway to explore possible SEED school locations all over the country, from Wisconsin, Ohio and New Jersey to Oakland, Chicago and New Orleans. But SEED officials were very cautious about making any definite predictions on future expansion.

SEED Chief Operating Officer Pyper Davis ’87 highlighted five criteria the Foundation considers when developing future SEED schools: broad-based community support, strong leadership, a viable site, availability of private donor funding and operational funding from a public source.

“I think five years from now we’ll have four schools open and a fifth in the works,” Davis said. “The other piece that we’re really trying to balance is, as we grow, how do we balance the needs of supporting our existing schools and building the infrastructure for new schools?”

Vinnakota was more optimistic, estimating five to six SEED schools in five to seven years.

Graduating the first class in Baltimore, he said, will mean that “we’ll have captured enough data to prove that the success of the first school does not depend upon its location.”

Despite more than a decade of involvement, Vinnakota shows no signs of slowing down.

“I got into this to start a movement,” Vinnakota said. “And the movement is predicated on the idea that you can take any child [and] put them in an environment where they get [the] resources [they need], and they’ll do just as fine as any of us.”

“If we can do that,” he continued, “we fundamentally change the set of societal questions. It’s not: ‘We don’t know how to do this’ and throw up our arms. It’s actually: ‘We do know how to do this. It’s going to cost us three times as much to do it. So are we as a society willing to put our money where our mouth is?’ That’s what I’m driving toward.”